Experts and Critics

A recent article by a federal reserve economist laments the intrusion of nonprofessionals and amateurs into the field of economic discussion. http://www.scribd.com/doc/33655771/Economics-is-Hard She is inclusive; she dislikes bloggers but Krugman too. There is simply too much information, too many things to consider and the subtleties of these complexities mixing with the abstractions of general theories...well, it just can overwhelm the little people.

And then there is this declaration:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
This article claims that not only are people generally ill informed, they are resistant to making better decisions when given better information. Worse, the more sophisticated thinkers are the worst students because, presumably, they are more confident in their opinions and more convinced in the value of their starting points.

What's a guy to do?

The reflexive answer would be minimize the damage these poor thinkers can do. Professionals as well as critics. But critics do little damage; they just worry people. The experts on the other hand can do plenty. One is reminded of the dearly departed Long Term Capital Management, an investment company created by Nobel Prize winning economists whose brilliance was so great that they made all but a few cast a shadow. They invested and behaved almost in isolation--like a cult--with no criticism from without because no one could make any sense of what they were doing. And they created a disaster. The fund went bankrupt and almost took Citicorp with it. My bet is they would have benefited from a few more average opinions from minds feeding on less rarefied air. But they sought no advice. Nor did they take any lessons. Indeed, a few years ago, the same people came back to the marketplace with the same philosophy and attracted three more billion dollars which they then lost in a new and improved bankruptcy.

There is a theme here. History is littered with the efforts of men trying to shape the hard world to their mental vision. But unlike the scientific world which is intensely critical and hostile to anything but the most rigorously proven cause and effect, this softer world of quasi-science functions in a atmosphere virtually devoid of self criticism. So however flawed the critics are, they are mandatory by default.

And the experts? They should contract their horizons, minimize their scope. They should be cautious when their analysis is that the failure of a system was the result of not doing it hard or long enough. They should try to learn the differences between law and notion. They should be made to study Heisenberg and Quantum Entanglement. Then they might be able to reach the Nirvana that is the hallmark of scientific search for knowledge and its ideal, truth.

Humility.